Hey there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.

I'll be going over your notes and questions first quickly then I'll be moving on to your critique.

• If possible I recommend alongside more fineliners to consider getting a brush pen for filling in large areas of black like shadows. It's also useful for texture and will save you money on fineliners in the long run. (Less chance of destroying your nibs and fineliners aren't great at filling in areas where brush pens are.)

• I'll be answering your form intersection question in that exercise section.

• Finding fineliner more difficult than pencil is normal and part of the reason we use them, it forces you to work with your mistakes and make intentional lines while consciously using skills like applying line weight to make lines thicker. I'd suggest reading this article for more information on why we use ink the way we do, as for what you can do to improve it's a mileage thing, the more you use ink the more comfortable it'll become.

• If you're drawing digitally by all means do the exercises as a warm up, but ultimately redoing the lessons would just be grinding at this point. It'd be best to use your free drawing time following the 50% rule that is discussed here.

• All lines that need to flow smoothly should be drawn from your shoulder, again this is something that requires mileage the more you do it the more you'll get used to it. The only time that we really give an ok on drawing from your wrist or elbow is when it involves some textures because they don't always flow smoothly.

With all of that out of the way I can start your critique, you're making progress but I'll be listing things below that will hopefully help you achieve better results in your future attempts.

• There's a few things to note in your arrows, for starters your pages are pretty bare and could be filled more. There are spots where you should be overlapping your lines to create new curves, by not doing so it appears like the arrow stretches and hurts the solidity of the image. You should also experiment with foreshortening more, by utilizing foreshortening in both the arrow itself as well as the space in between curves of the arrow we can really sell the illusion of an arrow moving through 3D space as discussed here.

• In the organic forms with contours exercises you're creating forms that are much too complex. Our goal here is to create a simple sausage with both ends being roughly the same size, and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form as discussed here. When it comes to the contours themselves keep in mind that you want to be shifting their degrees along the form itself. The degree of a contour line basically represents the orientation of that cross-section in space, relative to the viewer, and as we slide along the sausage form, the cross section is either going to open up (allowing us to see more of it) or turn away from the viewer (allowing us to see less), as shown here. You also redraw some of your contour lines it appears, which as mentioned in the answers to your questions is a habit you don't want to build, we have to work with our mistakes.

• In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows. This makes it difficult to create proper gradients which are useful when we want to create focal points in more complex pieces. For more information on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here, I'd also like you to look at this image which shows how when even dealing with thin line like textures we want to outline and fill the shadow to create a more dynamic looking texture overall.

• If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, right now this exercise is just meant to get students to start thinking about how their forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how to define those relationships on the page, we'll be going over them more in the upcoming lessons. Again some of these pages could be fiilled a bit more, and some forms could be a bit more solid, it does give the impression that you may be tackling these exercises a bit too hastily.

• When tackling the organic intersections exercise again I'd suggest trying to draw forms stacking upwards rather than around the side, some of your forms don't rest in a way that would make much sense if they had gravity applied to them. Some of your forms also flatten out and appear less solid than they could because they're too complex overall, working on simplifying your forms will be beneficial here. As for your shadows they're mostly hugging the form creating them rather than being cast in a single direction. I'd recommend pushing your light into the top left or right corner and really experimenting with pushing your shadows further, simple sets of forms like this are nice to work with before moving on to more complicated ones.

Overall you do have things to work on but this isn't a bad step forward. I will however be asking you to resubmit some work so I can make sure you understand what is being asked of in these exercises

Please re-read through and resubmit:

-2 pages of the organic forms with contours exercise.

Once completed put them into an album and reply to this critique with them, I'll go over them and note anything you need to work and move you onwards once you've shown you're ready.

Remember to take your time, ghost every mark you make and draw them confidently.

I look forward to seeing your work.